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Tipped Off

The first time it happened was at a Fourth of July picnic in New Hampshire. I’d just turned in my book manuscript to the copy editor and was in a celebratory mood until a friend tugged at my elbow. She’d found a thick stack of letters written by my subjects, three New England sisters of the 19th century, in a trunk in her attic. Did I want to read them?

I shivered in the July heat. Hundreds of similar stacks of letters, albeit stored in acid-free manuscript boxes in library archives, were the reason it had taken me 20 years to finish the book. I’d thought I was done with all that. Could I face more weeks of deciphering the sisters’ difficult handwriting — and would my publisher give me the time? What if these letters revealed something new, or even worse, something incorrect in my manuscript? Still — I had to find out. I said yes.

The second time was different. I was in the middle of writing a biography of Margaret Fuller when a man from Idaho approached me after a speech I’d given to tell me about a letter he knew of in California that might be of interest for my research. He had a photocopy at home — would I like him to send it to me?

Photo

Credit Jennifer Heuer

The answer was yes, without hesitation. One of the reasons I’d selected Fuller as a subject was that virtually all her letters were in print — six volumes of them. My time sifting through archives would be minimal, but I hankered for the feeling of fine paper between my fingers, and the intimacy of any inky scrawl. Besides, I had plenty of time to make use of any revelations that might emerge from what my informant told me was a rare unpublished letter by Ralph Waldo Emerson concerning the 1850 shipwreck in which his dear friend Margaret Fuller had drowned at age 40.

The tragedy was among the most famous in American literary history. Fuller, a pioneering feminist and foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, was returning from Italy with her much younger husband, a soldier in the Roman Guard, and their 2-year-old son, conceived out of wedlock. Fuller had kept her family a secret during the 18 months she’d covered the failed Italian revolution of 1848-49 for the Tribune, and when she revealed their existence to friends in America, many, including Emerson, urged her not to return home to face scandal. When the trio drowned, just 300 yards offshore at Fire Island, the triple-masted Elizabeth driven into a sandbar by a ferocious storm, they were widely mourned. Emerson sent Henry David Thoreau, then in 1850 still a little known writer, to help search for the bodies (Fuller’s was never found) and to scour the sands for her belongings, including a manuscript she planned to publish about her years in Rome (also lost). Privately, many believed she was better off dead.

I gave the man my e-mail address, but heard nothing. Why hadn’t I thought to ask for details? Perhaps, I consoled myself, there was no letter. How could something so consequential have gone unremarked for nearly two centuries? Then, two years later, after I’d turned in the book to my editor, a subject line screamed out from my inbox: “Found! Emerson Letter.” He’d unearthed his copy — provided to him by a friend who’d worked as an appraiser for a California archive — on a housecleaning binge. Was I still interested?

The only thing worse than learning about potentially explosive information at the 11th-and-a-half-hour is having another writer get to it first. Midway through research on my first biography, I’d come across an obscure manuscript that documented one sister’s suppressed love for her brother-in-law (Nathaniel Hawthorne!). Game-changing discoveries can happen, and I’d prefer they happened to me. Of course I had to read the letter, and the photocopy wasn’t enough. Soon I was sitting in the windowless basement archive of the Swedenborgian House of Studies in Berkeley reading a four-page letter in Emerson’s bold and mercifully legible script addressed to Hugh Maxwell, Collector of the Port of New York.

The cache of letters I’d been tipped off to for my first book had netted only a few choice phrases and confirmed some minor points of speculation. Most of all I was relieved not to have discovered any mistakes I’d have to correct. But this Emerson letter, although just one missive, was a discovery of a different order. By finding an unknown manuscript in Emerson’s hand, I felt I’d moved into American Lit’s big leagues.

In the letter I began to read, the Concord sage implored Mr. Maxwell, a New York City customs official, who had “instituted a search for property plundered” from the smashed up Elizabeth, to look harder. And he mentioned “a friend” – Thoreau – whom he’d “dispatched” to Fire Island “immediately, on hearing of the wreck.” The woman whose body and book Thoreau sought had been his first editor; she’d achieved international fame soon after printing his first poems in “The Dial” with her own book, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” in which she argued that “We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.”

The four pages that I held in my hands brought together in a moment of palpable crisis three 19th-century geniuses whose ideas still challenge us today.

In the folder with Emerson’s letter were a half dozen more written by celebrities of the time — Washington Irving, Horace Mann, Millard Fillmore. But they were brief notes declining speaking engagements or providing references for applicants to night watchman or customhouse posts. Emerson’s was a cry from the heart that rang out across the centuries. He provided — and here was the news for me, as the biographer — the lists Thoreau had made of Fuller’s baggage and possessions. Two large and two smaller trunks, a “pretty large case full of books,” a tin box with “the initials M.F.” and specific items of jewelry: two seal rings, one breast pin, one eyeglass with a heavy gold handle and chain. “One empty trunk, also, . . . I understand came ashore, —whether emptied by the sea or by thieves, is not known,” Emerson wrote. When the Elizabeth ran aground within sight of shore, its passengers and crew assumed that someone in the crowd gathered on the beach would save them; Margaret Fuller and her husband and son apparently drowned because scavengers were too busy looting trunks filled with expensive silks and Leghorn hats to attempt a rescue.

And then the letter ended with a grand flourish: R. Waldo Emerson. I’d always known that Emerson’s family and friends called him Waldo, not Ralph. But here it was, in his own hand, in a letter to a stranger. And Thoreau’s lists — of course he would make lists! Thoreau was a surveyor by profession, a recorder of natural facts in his journals, and manufactured, as part of a family business, a superior lead pencil.

The beauty of this letter was that the truth of what I already knew was getting, if it’s possible, even truer — my subjects’ quirks and predilections underscored in these inky words. In the end, I changed little in my book. I simply added Thoreau’s lists and Waldo’s poignant quote. I’d had a hunch the letter would be important, but it turned out to be for an unexpected reason.

Sympathy drives both research and writing in biography, and severing the tie when a book is done can be painful. My latest book was particularly challenging because I had to kill off Fuller, my heroine, at the height of her powers. And I had to do so in dramatic fashion. No letter could alter her fate.

My trip to Berkeley allowed me to hold a link to Fuller’s final days in my hands. The letter was a true, tangible reminder that this was history — her story — not mine. I could let her go.

Megan Marshall, author of “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life,” teaches nonfiction writing in the M.F.A. program at Emerson College.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/24/2013, on page SR2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Tipped Off.

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